_Tragi-Comedy in an Alkali Flat_
The Traileys, with Sam and Bert, stayed at the marquee camp a week.
At the end of that time, the snow had disappeared; also Trailey's
foot was doing nicely. Nevertheless, that gentleman arranged for
Bert to do his driving for him. To this no one objected, not even
Esther.
Trails were now made doubly treacherous by the water from the melted
snow. Every few miles one or other of the wagons sunk to its axles.
Sometimes they wriggled from the grasping clutch of the sticky morass
by doubling-up; but much oftener by unloading. And because of the
strangeness of the tasks they were constantly faced with, and the
weirdness of the methods they employed for their accomplishment, at
least one-half their truly prodigious efforts was so much time and
labour wasted.
About one day's travel, roughly speaking, from Battleford, they ran
into a screamingly comic incident, one of the kind which anyone
except an old-timer, familiar with the peculiarities of the Barr
Colonists, may possibly pooh-pooh at, or quite likely regard as pure
myth. It is no trick to wrench credulity in these sceptical times.
Indeed, it seems the more people know, the less they believe.
However, an alkali flat of immense length, and probably two or three
hundred yards wide, was the pastoral setting chosen by an inscrutable
Fate for the production of a pathetic little scene. To the right
were the rounded hills marking the giant Saskatchewan's mile-wide
meanderings towards Lake Winnipeg. On the left, the perfectly-level
alkali plain strung itself out to the limit of vision. In front,
more rounded and wooded hills; and, behind, a gently-rolling country
disappearing into black perspective, with a ridge in the foreground
upon which grew a long, straggling curtain of leafless poplars.
Only their axles, and boxes, had prevented the greyish, viscid, oozy
alkali (in consistency a sort of cross between wet concrete and
quicksand) from almost engulfing not only half a dozen colonists'
wagons, but the oxen and horses as well.
The animals had plunged and struggled till they could do so no
longer. As fast as one leg was withdrawn from the sticky stuff--with
a plop like a huge cork shooting out of a bottle, deeper and yet
deeper sank the other quivering limbs. Enervated as they were by
hardships and neglect, yet the horses were sufficiently alive to
throw themselves about in terror as they felt themselves being
inexorably drawn downwards. Fortunately, their bellies, empty as
most of these were, prevented them from being completely swallowed up.
Thinking to find firmer ground, each driver had steered his wagon
into the great, wide flat (which, by the way, it was impossible to
avoid)--striking out a course of his own, only to meet the same sort
of disaster which had overtaken the others.
Before rushing into the prairie's shallow, saucer-like, gluey plain,
where it waited patiently like a huge trap beneath a covering of
waving, reedy grass, Sam and Bert first did some scouting. With
infinite care, as they thought, they chose a beautifully-camouflaged,
innocent-looking place to cross.
So firm did the ground appear, that in the heat of the sun it had
begun to turn snow-white with the absolute purity of its behaviour.
In a very few minutes, they discovered that it was trouble of the
most acute kind, and lots of it, which was causing the alkali flat to
turn white, like salt.
They both steered their teams from afoot, a method green Englishmen
invariably choose. The Trailey family were also walking.
As soon as the wagons sunk down, which they quickly did, and before
the horses were able to do much struggling, Sam and Bert promptly
unhooked all the traces. Finding themselves at some liberty, the
half-starved creatures at once began biting greedily at the
heaven-sent pasturage, all the while cunningly lifting their
feet--like a cat does on a wet floor--as these were sucked in by the
insatiable ooze.
Fifty yards or so to their right, another wagon was sitting
peacefully on its axles. A man and a woman and a young girl seemed
to be conducting themselves rather queerly--even for Barr Colonists.
"There's somethink up wiv that party over there," remarked Sam the
sympathetic, as he gazed curiously at the little group. "Lissen ter
the kid sobbin'! She's fair broken-'earted."
Bert, too, was human enough to forget his own troubles for a short
time when brought face to face with the minor tragedies of
fellow-colonists. "Let's go and investigate, Sam," he said, at once
commencing to walk across.
A thinnish, weedy man, wearing tweeds of shabby aspect, was standing
alongside a hole in the alkali which he had evidently only recently
dug. Plainly he was not by profession a navvy, nor a sexton, nor of
any other occupation whose chief tool is the lowly spade.
The hole in the ground looked as if it had been excavated by a very
incompetent fox terrier. Most of the gummy soil was sticking to the
man's boots, with here and there a little adhering lovingly to his
face and clothes. The rest clung fondly to the spade--mostly about
the handle. Another thinnish person, a woman, enveloped in a
waterproof coat of a light fawn colour, was seated close by in the
long grass, which hereabouts was profuse--a godsend the party's
rack-like, black-and-white-spotted oxen lunged strenuously forward
from their bogged position to investigate.
"Wot's up?" asked Sam of the little girl, who was convulsed with
grief. The woman on the ground wiped a tear from her left eye,
snuffled slightly, squeezed her handkerchief into a damp ball, put it
in the pocket of her coat, then turned her face away, apparently to
hide its misery.
"Fa--Fa--Fanny's d-dead," gulped the little maiden, who was perhaps
about ten.
The man turned dreary eyes on Sam, who noticed, stretched out beside
the freshly-scooped-out hole, stark and stiff in death, a young pig.
The man wiped his perspiring brow with the sleeve of his coat and
sighed.
"Yes, Fanny's gone," he echoed dismally; then, pulling his watch out
and looking at it, he said: "Five o'clock when she left us--to the
very minute," and his voice, a high-pitched, clear falsetto, went
fluttering out into the void like a choir-boy soloist's tones dying
away among the rafters of a lofty cathedral.
Catching the extreme solemnity of the occasion, Sam murmured:
"Pore Fanny."
Bert coughed sympathetically. Esther, who had also come across to
see what was the matter, emitted a soft little sigh at Sam's words.
She was a very tender-hearted girl, with the Englishwoman's love of
animals.
"Wot killed it?" asked Sam, as he surveyed the fortunate pig, in the
same glance instantly comprehending that "Fanny" was in reality a
little boy porker.
"We do--on't kn--o--ow; o--h o-o-h," wailed the little girl.
"Stomach pains, I fancy," said the man in his sing-song voice.
A smothered blubber came from the woman on the grass, with whom,
woman-like, Esther had been commiserating tenderly.
"Belly-ache," she vouched confidently between the emission of a
couple of small-sized tear-drops, which just then trickled from her
reddened eyes, grazed her chin, and fell splashing on her rain-coat.
"I fed 'er reg'lar, an' all. In fact, she lived just like one of us."
A second, and closer, inspection revealed to Bert that the dead
porker's ears were in a shocking state. They were mangled, and
almost non-existent. Indicating them with the toe of his boot, he
said: "What did that?"
"She used to play with Daisy a lot--in the box there," the man
observed, and he nodded towards a little cage arrangement which was
suspended to the back of the wagon by means of a length of rope.
"Got a bit rough with one another at times," he added.
"Daisy's ears's the same," snuffled the woman on the ground.
Bert and Sam walked round to the cage to inspect Daisy, whilst Esther
comforted the grieving females. Sure enough, the ears of the
surviving piggy were chewed almost completely off.
"Started to eat one anuvver, my Gawd if they didn't!" Sam exclaimed.
"Pore little bleeders!"--then, turning to the man, he said: "Buy 'em
at Sarskatoon?"
"Yes--at a farm just this side. Five dollars each. And them three
fowls there, a dollar apiece."
Slung from the rearmost hoop of the schooner-top, the sheet of which
was removed, presumably to give free play to the relatively cooling
breeze, for the day had been blisteringly hot, was a second cage.
This held in close captivity three speckled farmyard birds.
"Plymouth Rocks," the man explained proudly as Sam and Bert stared up
at them. What little could be seen of the birds seemed to indicate
that they weren't very ancient--not above seven or eight, perhaps.
"Gettin' any eggs?" queried Sam, materialistic as usual.
"Not yet. My wife says they swing about too much. She says it makes
'em seasick. What d'you think yourself?"
"Shouldn't wonder," said Bert, thoughtfully.
"But when we get to our land," went on the man, "I think they'll give
us a few."
As though in protest, a couple of the fowls cocked their heads up,
and, with bursting throats and wide-open beaks, proclaimed to their
ingenuous owner their unimpeachable masculinity in a pair of the
lustiest and most competitive cock-a-doodle-doos that ever resounded
across an astonished prairie.
"Does that uvver one do that?" Sam questioned suspiciously.
"No."
"You ain't alf lucky."
"Oh, why?"
"Them fowls wot just crowed is cocks--but the uvver's an 'en."
This piece of highly-informative news gradually seeped into the man's
rather one-sided intelligence. He had been a draper's assistant back
home in England--in Manchester, to be exact, where he had excelled in
the manly art of selling calico, and corsets, and cotton stockings.
In those days--at any rate, it was so among the Barr Colonists--the
very first thing a man did to his stock (even before feeding them)
was to endow them with names. People with classical educations
christened their animals Plato, Virgil, Psyche, and such like
appellations. Those with biblical proclivities and training resorted
to Pharaoh, Esau, Mordecai, and similar titles; whereas the common
people fell back on Bill, and Sally, and Prince, and other every-day
names.
Quite early in the game, Sam had remarked this trait. Was not their
own team bearing up bravely under the burden of "Tempest" and
"Kruger"? And weren't Trailey's nags nicknamed "Arthur" and
"Freddie"? All round him--on the trail, in camp, at Saskatoon, had
he not listened to vapid oxen being frantically inveigled with
"Sissy," and "Carl," and "Seneca," and terribly frequently, also,
with long-drawn-out strings of curses, which were fast dooming
otherwise good-living young Englishmen to everlasting perdition? One
colonist, an ex-schoolmaster and classical scholar, actually named
his oxen "Aristophanes" and "Euripides." His explanation was that
the former ox, possessing very long horns, was always hooking his
mate, which, because of having no horns at all, was very docile.
"Wot's their nymes?" Sam asked of the man, nodding at the fowls.
The proud owner instantly waxed enthusiastic. "That one with only
one toe on its right foot--you can't see it from here; well, that's
called Phyllis, after my wife's sister. The other one, the one that
doesn't crow, I've named Susie--to remind me of my first wife, the
mother of my little girl there. That other beggar, the one with its
eye pecked out, we call Amos, on account of my once having an uncle
named Amos, who came home from the Indian Mutiny with only one eye.
He was a canteen sergeant."
"Yes, it's very 'andy to 'ave only one eye in the harmy," observed
Sam with the innocent manner of a conjurer about to produce three or
four hundred yards of linoleum out of a silk hat.
"Oh, why?" demanded the ex-draper, biting hugely.
"Why, because," replied Sam, winking wickedly at Bert, "when a sodger
wiv only one eye charges the henemy, it cuts the barsteds in 'alf."
Bert crumpled up in a sort of fit, as though he'd been smitten with
sudden colic. "I never thought of that," laughed the other man.
"Very smart nymes you've gev them fowls," said Sam, whose face was as
straight and as hypocritically solemn as an undertaker's at a dead
rival's funeral.
"Yes, an' they all answer to 'em, too. You ought to see Amos there,
when the wife calls to him an' says, 'Amos, you rascal, when are you
going to lay us some eggs?' He just sticks his head on one side an'
makes a noise in his throat like as if he was quietly chucklin' to
himself. He's a knowing bird, that."
"Jus' like an 'uman bein'--eh?"
"Yes."
Sam was anxious to learn how an obvious town-dweller could be so well
up in farmyard lore, so he said: "Where d'yer come from?"
"Manchester--but my wife's from Birmingham."
Sam adopted a slightly supercilious manner not at all uncommon with
individuals of his class, who either openly or secretly, or both,
despise all provincials.
Bermondsey, from its superior heights of cunningness, looked down
scornfully upon poor little simple Manchester. "That there Amos
cock'll be layin' eggs fer yore missis when Burning'am's a holiday
resource," mocked Sam.
Bert grinned and strolled off to join Esther, who had apparently
succeeded in diverting the woman's thoughts from the grief of an
unexpected bereavement to more pleasant matters connected with their
future life on the prairie, two hundred miles from anywhere.
"Yes, miss," the woman was saying, "my 'usband's goin' in for markit
gard'ning. 'E loves stewed prunes, so 'e'll know all about clippin'
branches off of roses, an' rodydendrums, an' things."
Esther smiled. She knew a little about pruning, herself. The
Trailey's back garden wall in England had been draped with ivy, off
which she often used to shave pieces in a worthy endeavour to
persuade it to trail itself across an old-fashioned doorway.
"----And yer want ter feed that pig," Sam was advising the husband,
who playfully commenced addressing a series of quaint, grunting
noises to Daisy as she reclined disconsolate in the hindmost cage of
the menagerie. "Nah it ain't got Fanny's ears ter chew at, it'll
snuff it, as true as yore nyme's ... Wot is yer nyme, if it ain't
arskin' too much?"
"Cox."
"Wot!"
"Cox. C-o-x, Cox."
For easily a whole minute Sam was struck completely dumb. That a man
bearing such a name should be transporting two cocks and a hen to the
distant Colony was too much even for sophisticated Sam.
"No wonder yer knows all abaht poultry," he said when he had
recovered from the shock. Still wearing a look of astonishment, he
added: "My nyme's Potts."
"Oh," said the ex-draper, "I have some cousins named Potts.
Relations, perhaps," but observing that Sam's stature was at least a
couple of inches less than his own, and that his features were far
from classic, he said in a changed tone, from which all warmth had
been carefully extracted, "it's likely to be very distant, though, if
you are."
"I'm from the Big Smoke," returned Sam guilelessly. "Ain't got no
relashuns up in the north, not as I knows of--leastw'ys, if I 'ave,
they ain't farmers."
This rather subtle compliment pleased the Manchester man so much,
that he called to his wife to ask where he might find a small crust
of bannock with which to banquet the surviving pig, Daisy. "And you
fetch that white stone from over there, Annie," he ordered his little
girl, "an' we'll put it on Fanny's grave."
Annie broke out in fresh paroxysms of woe, but she obeyed. Then the
future market gardener, spitting into the palm of one of his hands in
the most approved fashion of English navvies working by the hour,
started industriously to inter the porcine corpse. With fitting
respect, Sam, Bert and Esther quietly left the stricken family to its
obsequies.
Though the sun was rather more than half-way down from the zenith,
the heat was almost overpowering. All round them colonists toiled
and sweated; some digging in front of the buried wagon-wheels; some
hooking two and three teams together in a long string, trying to
overcome the immobility of a half-emptied load, only to see-saw their
horses or oxen into impossible; knots; others laboriously
transporting their stuff bit by bit on to hard ground, till their
wagons were entirely unloaded.
The last-mentioned scheme was the one Sam and Bert decided to adopt.
Systematically, they set about it, the ladies carrying the lighter
articles, and the men the heavy goods. When the great gulf of the
prairie night swallowed them up, with their heart-testing toil only
partly done, they erected their tents and prepared a hasty supper
over a cheery campfire; then, as the smouldering shadows wrestled
more and more successfully with the fitful gleams from the dying
embers, they retired to their roughly-improvised beds and almost
instantly fell asleep.